The present invention relates to fabricating sheet metal structures and more specifically relates to welding sheet metal parts together to form structures.
The most common way to fabricate sheet metal structures, used on agricultural equipment, for example, is by welding flat sheet metal plates together with the plates being disposed orthogonally to each other, or by forming flat sheet metal plates into angle or channel members and to weld the legs of one or the other of these members to a flat sheet metal plate, with the legs being disposed orthogonally to the plate, to form the desired structures. Positioning of the parts for welding requires tooling to accurately hold them in position. These parts are then welded in place using fillet or butt welds at the intersection of the orthogonally disposed sections of these parts. The welding of these parts is most always done on one side of the parts being welded. This results in the heat of the welding process and the weld material being concentrated on this one side which causes the welded component to distort when the weld cools and shrinks. This distortion then has to be overcome during the assembly of the component into the implement being built.